


Even in Death

by rarmaster



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, referenced past death because They're Ghosts, spoilers through [S] GAME OVER
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:19:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: After things go absolutely to shit, Jade and Dave wake up in the afterlife.





	Even in Death

**Author's Note:**

> there was a bit in [S] Terezi: Remem8er where it showed everyone from [S] GAME OVER (and other deaths) waking up as dream ghosts and I thought to myself... that I _really_ wanted to write the following conversation between Jade and Dave in that moment, so here we are.

“Aw fuck.”

Dave’s voice is the first thing you hear, followed shortly by the sensation of a weight leaving your body.

You groan a little and force your eyes open, the struggle familiar in ways it hasn’t been in years, because staying awake hasn’t been as much of a problem to you for a while, with Prospit destroyed and its siren call not around to pull you to it. You stare up at the dark sky filled with rainbow cracks for a moment, and realize this is a dream bubble, which makes the struggle-waking-up thing make even _less_ sense.

You move to sit up, but then realize the rest of your predicament. Dave’s moved his weight off of you, but he’s still braced with his hands on one side of your body and his knees on the other. Why had he been laying across you?

“Shit, sorry,” he apologizes, and scrambles so he’s just sitting on his knees now.

You laugh at him despite yourself. He offers out a hand to you, and though you don’t need it, you grip it firmly and allow him to pull you up so you’re both sitting. He moves to let go of your hand, but you don’t let him. You want to relish in how real and solid he is. This is… the first time the two of you have met in person. Dream-person, technically. But it’s not that different!

(Davesprite doesn’t count, of course. He was an entirely different guy. Er, sprite?)

You want to tell him how good it is to see him, but you think first you should maybe figure out how you got here. “Did we… fall asleep?” you ask, trying to piece your memories back together. They’re a little foggy.

Like, you guess you can understand yourself falling asleep at random. That seems par for the course. But why would Dave join you in a dream bubble like _this_? And, seriously what was with him laying across you like that!?

“Unfortunately, I think the answer isn’t nearly as bright and shiny as that,” Dave answers, and with the hand you don’t have in a death-grip, he reaches up to rub at his eyes, an action which displaces his sunglasses long enough to make you gasp.

His eyes are blank, glowing, white.

He’s dead.

“Oh _Dave_!” you exclaim, clutching his hand in both of your own. “What happened? Was it time shenanigans?” You sit up on your knees and push your face closer to his, trying to lighten the mood even as dread like slime settles in your stomach. “I thought you said you were done with those!”

He laughs like he appreciates it. “Nah, this ain’t a doomed Dave you’re talking to. It’s _the_ Dave. Just, yanno, dead.”

You thought that might be the case—a dog’s intuition?—but can’t remember enough of anything to know any more than that. Why is your brain so foggy!!! It’s bad and dumb. You remember going to save Jane and your grandpa from Jack and then… nothing.

But something about the hole in your brain feels… really… _really_ bad.

“One of the dogs must’ve got me when I wasn’t looking,” Dave continues, running his hand through his hair now.

“Dogs?” you ask.

“You know, Jack.”

“Ohhh.”

“There was another one of him, though. Well, not another Jack, but like, some guy with the same powers. Or, girl, I think? She was all white.” Dave pauses here for a second to shift how he’s sitting, pulling his legs out from underneath him and letting them dangle into the void below the stone slab you’re sitting on. “Dunno what her deal was, just that both of those stupid dogs were so worried about you being dead that they wouldn’t listen to common sense even if John had alchemized it into a hammer and hit them over the head with it.”

You laugh at the mental image, but then the rest of what Dave said registers to you. You let one of your hands fall away from his.

“Wait… I’m dead too?”

Your fingers brush the stone you’re sitting on, and you take a proper look at it, finally. It’s dark grey and emblazed with an emblem you could never mistake.

Dave nods, a short and kind of solemn thing. “I think I could’ve fixed it if I’d managed to get you away from those stupid dogs. But they wouldn’t let me pull you away from your quest bed. Their tiny little dog brains must have thought it would bring you back to life, but you were already god tier, so like.”

“Dog tier,” you correct with a lopsided smirk, and Dave laughs.

Fond tears burn in your eyes, though, at the gift Bec gave you by throwing himself into your sprite. His dog brain may have been too tiny to recognize the consequences, or to understand common sense, but man did that dog love you. He loved you _so much_. And the echoes of that love make your heart warm. You miss him a lot.

“What a shitty upgrade god tier even is, though,” Dave says. “Sure you get fancy clothes and the ability to fly but the immortality shtick is basically useless. Guess ‘cause I was protecting your body my death counted as heroic, but still how fucking shitty is it that I died while trying to talk some sense into your dogs.”

“It _is_ very shitty,” you agree. “But I guess it’s good for making sure you don’t die of something embarrassing, like a peanut allergy.”

“Oh god do you think John could even still die of a peanut allergy if he’s god tier, how does that work,” Dave says without taking a breath at all, and you laugh because this is exactly the kind of conversation swerving nonsense you love about him.

“Well unless eating the peanut was somehow heroic I think he’s good,” you say.

“Yeah but what if it’s a just death because it’s all he deserves for his hubris of eating the fucking peanut even though he knew he shouldn’t have to begin with.”

“Hmmmmmmm.” You’re intrigued, and Dave has a good point, but you have no fucking clue what the answer to this is.

“Guess if we ever see John again we can ask him to try, then he can be ghost buddies with us if it doesn’t work out,” Dave says.

“Agreed.”

“Also your argument that it keeps you from embarrassing death sucks, my death was absolutely embarrassing.”  

You put your hands up in surrender, except you’re still holding Dave’s hand, so that only kind of works.

“God tier? More like shit tier!” Dave laughs, then he turns his head toward you, and you’ve spent long enough with Davesprite to know that the quirk of his lips and raise of his eyebrows means he’s got another joke coming that he thinks is hilarious and you probably will think is hilarious too. “But hey,” he says. “At least I don’t got it as bad as you.”

You crinkle your eyebrows together, not sure where he’s going with this, but kind of excited to find out.

“What do you mean?” you ask.

“I mean, my god upgrade didn’t come with the urge to bark randomly or the irresistible desire for snausages at inopportune times,” he says.

And you _do_ laugh but you also feel a little bit offended. Also god dammit why did Dave have to bring up snausages, now you can’t stop thinking about them.

“At least my outfit looks cool,” you counter which, you know isn’t that good of a counter or insult at all but the snausages on the brain make it hard to come up with anything else. Wait, can you even _eat_ snausages if you’re a ghost? If you can’t then that suuuuucks.

“Hey I love my cape!” Dave argues, picking it up and waving it around for emphasis.

You both laugh.

“Anyway, how did I die?” you ask, and you shift so you’re sitting a little more comfortably next to Dave. You keep your fingers intertwined with his. “Please tell me all the cool heroic details! I can’t seem to remember it, or anything else since uh, arriving in the new session.”

“Uhhhhhhh,” Dave says, dragging out the sound long enough that it starts to make you worried. Then he coughs and says: “Hey do you even think you can eat snausages if you’re a ghost—”

“Nice try, Dave, I already had that train of thought so it’s not as funny when you bring it up,” you tell him, starting to feel a little bit annoyed. And nervous? What’s he _hiding_?

“It’s an important question!!” he tries, but you aren’t having any of it.

“Look I’m sorry if my death was much less embarrassing than yours but you can’t just leave me _hanging,_ ” you press, and you aren’t going to hear no for an answer. “Come on, it was cool, right? Did I die protecting someone else? I must’ve, right—”

But Dave shakes his head, short and solemn. He’s not looking at you; instead his face is fixed low enough that if his glasses were any looser they’d slide right off his nose and into oblivion.

“Then… what…?”

“You had a building fall on you, I don’t know how that could possibly be heroic,” Dave says, and his voice is tilted like he’s trying to make a joke out of it but he doesn’t manage well enough for you to buy it.

“Did I… push someone out of the way first?” you ask.

He shakes his head.

“Was it like John and the peanut and because I knocked the building down with my own powers it was my hubris that killed me?”

You mean for that one to be more of a joke than a serious suggestion, but Dave doesn’t laugh like you hoped he would. Not even a little chuckle.

“Dave, come on,” you press.

He swallows.

“It’s bad,” he says.

“How bad?” you press again, though the uneasiness the hole in your memory brings you makes you wonder.

“Like… you were being controlled by the batterwitch, bad?” Dave says.

“Oh.”

Ice settles into your belly. The hole in your memories doesn’t clear up with the revelation, but that just leaves you room to imagine what might have occurred that you can’t remember. You know you have some pretty gnarly powers. How might have those powers been used for evil? Did you attack any of your friends? Did—

You pull away from Dave in horror.

“You didn’t have to fight me, did you!?” you demand.

He hastily shakes his head. “I mean, you sure as heck tried, but.”

That makes you feel marginally better.

“And like… none of you had to kill me, right?” you ask. “That’s not why I’m dead, is it?”

He shakes his head again. “Nah it was some troll who I didn’t even know the name of,” he answers. “She sure fucked a lot of shit up.” He grimaces at the thought, and then continued, more hesitantly. “Guess your death was just, thanks to all the shit the batterwitch made you do, even though _I_ think that’s bullshit since like, it wasn’t _your_ fault.”

“But if there hadn’t been a way to… un-evil-ify me…” you counter.

Dave lowers his head again, the mirth he’d had for a glimmering second there vanishing again.

“Whatever, doesn’t matter now.” He swings his feet and watches them. “We’re dead, at the end of what was another doomed timeline, I guess. Which feels like such shit after all that work.”

You let out a long sigh, unable to do anything other than agree. The scratch, those three long years on the spaceship, all for nothing? It makes you feel Supremely shitty.

“But uh, hey,” you say, clearing your throat. “At least we’re here. At least we have each other.”

You lean into him, resting your head on his shoulder. Your ear brushes against his cheek because you’re kind of bad at navigating how to place your head when accommodating the doggy ears, so he kind of twitches and squirms for a moment until you have your head settled in a _less_ obnoxious position.

“Sorry,” you mumble.

“Nah it’s cool.”

He squeezes your hand a little tighter. Leans into you.

“It’s nice to see you again,” he says after a moment. “I really missed not-evil Jade.”

You giggle, because the way he says it makes it hard not to. “It’s nice to see you, too.”

Maybe it isn’t even close to ideal, but… Even if it is in death, you’re happy you got to finally see him, face to face.


End file.
